Wake Me Up by Ed Sheeran

            I stumbled out of the club with the girl I’d just met in tow. Her six-inch heels made it nearly impossible for her to move at a pace quicker than a shuffle so, we walked, hand in hand, back to my apartment. I’d already forgotten her name at this point but it wasn’t like it mattered.

            I fumbled a bit with my keys but managed to get the door unlocked and the lights inside turned on, dropping my jacket on the chair by the door and throwing my keys in the dish that my roommate and I kept on the counter. I turned around to catch her lips as she threw them at me and we fell down the hallway and into my bedroom, landing on my bed. About twenty minutes later, I was asleep.

            The next morning, I woke up with a massive headache at 8:30 in the morning.  It was no surprise that the opposite side of the bed was cold and empty, abandoned at some point in the night or early that morning. I laid in bed for a few minutes before I heard movement outside my door and saw it swing open slowly. Noah, my roommate slowly entered and after seeing that I was awake threw a bottle of Advil at me without a word. He leaned against the doorframe with an odd look on his face that I knew meant he had something to say. I’d been best friends with him for years so I’d become pretty good at catching these sort of things. Not to mention he wore his feelings on his face 90 percent of the time.

            “I didn’t see you leave the club last night.”

            Yes you did because I made sure you did.

            I remained silent, shrugging his comment off as I threw two of the pills into the back of my throat and swallowed them without water.

            “I met your new friend on her way out this morning. She seems nice.”

            He half smiled at his own “joke,” but I knew that seeing her this morning wasn’t funny to him at all.  His mouth might be laughing but his eyes had lost the shine in them that they usually held. They had been holding it a lot less lately, to be quite honest.

             I gave him a half-assed laugh to acknowledge the presence of the half-assed joke and the smile seemed to slowly melt off his face.

            “Probably better she left on her own,” I said, standing and walking past him into the kitchen, “I always hate when I have to kick them out the next morning.”

            Another joke, this time from me. We were getting worse at this exchange every weekend.

            I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat down at the bar to consume it. He stood cross the bar and just looked at me. After an uncomfortable amount of time, I finally asked him why he was staring at me like I was some sort of puzzle. He didn’t respond right away, but instead just looked away and then back at me as if he wasn’t sure what to say next.

            “Ethan, you’ve just been bringing home a lot of girls lately.”

            I looked at him, chewing my cereal with a look of apathy on my face. “So?” I said, shrugging my shoulders and returning to my food.

            “I don’t know…” he mumbled. “It’s… well… nevermind.”

            He turned and began to walk away but I wasn’t finished quite yet.

            “I mean, It’s just sex, right?”

            He heard the words he’d once used against me used against him and something in him seemed to change.

            “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he threw at me with out turning to face me. His decision to break character in the play we’d been putting on for quite some time now took me by surprise, but it was his words that hit me like a match hitting a pool of gasoline.

            “You seem upset.” I said, sadistically. “I don’t understand, why, though. After all, we just fucked a few hundred times.”

            He turned to face me and walked back to the bar where he placed both hands on the surface and looked at me with his eyes flat and lifeless. “Let it go, Ethan,” he said before turning and heading towards the couch, flopping down and turning on the television.

I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes and finally, I lost control. I stood up and walked over the time T.V. that I turned off and then stood in front of.

            “Why, Noah?”

            He didn’t say anything.

            “Tell me why!” I yelled at him, eyes watering and face turning red.

            “I don’t know what you want me to say!” he said back to me, leaning forward and running his hands through his hair. “It was a mistake. It was fun while it lasted but now we need to move on.”

            “Oh, because you’re doing such a good fucking job of that, Noah. Coming onto me when we’re home alone and sleeping with me, just to turn around and act like it didn’t mean a thing.”

            “Because it shouldn’t—“

            “But it does. You can’t keep telling me it doesn’t.”

            He was silent. He just looked at me. Actually listening for once.

            “I know I mean something to you or we wouldn’t have gotten into this position to begin with. You treat me like I’m nothing ninety-nine percent of the time but I deal with it because that other one percent makes me feel like it’s all worth it.

            “But I’m tired of pretending, Noah. We’ve been playing this game for two years now, keeping it a secret and acting like it doesn’t exist. I know everything about you and you know everything about me. We’ve fucked hundreds – hell – probably even thousands of times and in the process you’ve become my best friend. Yet, for some reason, you can’t seem to return any sort of feelings to me. You keep shrugging this off as nothing or ‘just sex.’ But we both know it’s not.

            “I can’t do this anymore. But I can’t leave either. So, the way I see it I have one choice.”

            “Ethan, don’t—“

            “No, you don’t,” Noah was standing at this point and staring at the ground. “If you want to keep pretending then that’s fine. But I’ve had enough lies.”

            His eyes moved up my body and looked at me. I thought I saw a small trace of the color come back to his eyes, but it disappeared as quickly as it came and I just stood there looking like a fool in my underwear, crying and yelling at my best friend/roommate/fuck buddy who was obviously in way over his head.

            I hated him. I hated him so much for letting things come to this. I wanted to kill him and kiss him at the same time but all I could do was stand there, facing him, motionless.

            “I love you, Noah,” I said. “I hate to admit it but it’s your fucking fault and there’s nothing I can do about it, that’s just the way it is.”

            Noah stood across the room from me, staring at me, obviously overwhelmed by my outburst. He had tried to cut things off when he started to recognize something in my eyes besides lust, but we’d been best friends forever and this wasn’t something that you could just put in the past. It all started after we moved in together and what was supposed to just be casual sex eventually became what I was standing there expressing now. We fucked all the time and often slept in the same bed. We would lie awake for hours talking about everything and nothing but yet, he still was distant. It finally had become too much for me.

            I felt like we were a thousand miles apart just then, but then I started noticing some of the color coming back into his eyes. He began to cry and sat down on the sofa again, putting his head in his hands.

            Unsure of what to do, I stood my ground.

            “I’m so sorry, Ethan,” he began. “I just don’t think I can do this.”

            My heart sank, despite the fact that I had expected no more than this outcome.

            “I should go,” I said, making my way to my room.

            I curled up in my bed and tried to go back to sleep. I could hear Noah in his room, shuffling things around the way he did whenever he got nervous, scared, or just over-stimulated. Somewhere along the line, I fell asleep.

            When I woke up, Noah was sitting cross-legged at the end of my bed, watching me. His eyes were still bloodshot from crying and his face was splotchy and red. I glanced at the clock, which read 1:33PM, and sat up, pulling my knees into my chest and looking at him.

            We sat in silence for a while before he broke it.

            “You were right. I should have never put you in a position like I did—“

            “We both put ourselves and each other in bad positions,” I responded, knowing full well that the blame didn’t belong solely to one person.
            “Regardless,” he said, “I would be lying to you if I said that I didn’t love you.”

            My heart skipped a beat when I heard the words.

            “Because I do love you. And maybe, just maybe, we can do this if we have each other.”

            He crawled over to me and kissed me on the forehead before lying down with me and holding me tightly around the torso.

            “I was scared,” he said quietly into my ear. “But I realized that life without you wouldn’t be one worth living and I would be stupid to let you get away. It’s going to be a slow process, but maybe we can do it.”

            He was crying again and I felt relieved. All the times that we had shared emotions in the past didn’t feel real compared to this one. Because I knew that he was finally okay. Or if he wasn’t, he was going to be.

            We were both going to be okay.